Australian director Jane Campion's Sweetie starts out as a cock-eyed oddball comedy, but when the title character shows up at her sister's house, it becomes a cock-eyed oddball drama about living with a mentally ill member of the family. Not that Kay gets a clean bill of mental health, but her quirks and progressively distant relationship with her boyfriend are eventually informed by Sweetie and their parents (who eventually enter the story). Her ill ease around trees is especially relevant through the metaphor of putting down roots and family trees. She is the dysfunctional fruit of a dysfunctional tree. In Sweetie, we find a grown child prey to wild mood swings, treated by way of revertigo by her father (who lets her get away with everything) and her sister (who shouts at her like one would a disobedient pet, and indeed, Sweetie takes on the traits of an animal when she's feeling anxious and angry). There's an actual child in the movie, and we can actively see some kind of family trauma transference going on as he is witness to the story. Campion manages to infuse her film with both ugliness and forgiveness, which has a beauty of its own. And visually, people are always in the wrong place in the frame, or we're too close, or we're at an odd angle, and that perfectly represents this family dynamic.
The story is told with so much humor and with such a unique visual style that the epic tragedy of what happens doesn't settle on us until the last few scenes. This is a sad story about sad people-- yet the movie itself is full of life and beauty and weird little details that make existence less of a fucking slog. Great film: a precursor of the quirky late 90s-early 00s comedies that were forthcoming.
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Siskoid
Australian director Jane Campion's Sweetie starts out as a cock-eyed oddball comedy, but when the title character shows up at her sister's house, it becomes a cock-eyed oddball drama about living with a mentally ill member of the family. Not that Kay gets a clean bill of mental health, but her quirks and progressively distant relationship with her boyfriend are eventually informed by Sweetie and their parents (who eventually enter the story). Her ill ease around trees is especially relevant through the metaphor of putting down roots and family trees. She is the dysfunctional fruit of a dysfunctional tree. In Sweetie, we find a grown child prey to wild mood swings, treated by way of revertigo by her father (who lets her get away with everything) and her sister (who shouts at her like one would a disobedient pet, and indeed, Sweetie takes on the traits of an animal when she's feeling anxious and angry). There's an actual child in the movie, and we can actively see some kind of family trauma transference going on as he is witness to the story. Campion manages to infuse her film with both ugliness and forgiveness, which has a beauty of its own. And visually, people are always in the wrong place in the frame, or we're too close, or we're at an odd angle, and that perfectly represents this family dynamic.ucuruju
The story is told with so much humor and with such a unique visual style that the epic tragedy of what happens doesn't settle on us until the last few scenes. This is a sad story about sad people-- yet the movie itself is full of life and beauty and weird little details that make existence less of a fucking slog. Great film: a precursor of the quirky late 90s-early 00s comedies that were forthcoming.